Each day the warren went through a cycle in which bustle segued imperceptibly into quiet and back again. This happened perhaps three or four times. To Ed, the quiet periods had a ghostly feel. Cold draughts made their way from cubicle to cubicle. Images of the Kefahuchi Tract glimmered from the cheap posters like religious icons. The kids were asleep, or out on the waste lot over towards the dockyards. Occasionally you would hear a sneeze or a sigh: that made it worse. You felt deserted by everything. Early evening was always like that: this evening it felt as if human life had stopped everywhere, not just in here.
All Ed could hear was Neena’s uneven breathing. She had got into an awkward position, on her front with one knee bent under her and her cheek pressed against the wall. “Push harder,” she kept saying indistinctly. This caused Ed, full of memory and melancholy, to shift his own position a little, allowing him to see across her long white back to the doorway where a shadowy figure was observing them. For a minute, Ed thought he was hallucinating his own father. A kind of raw gloom poured over him, a memory he couldn’t identify. Then he shuddered (“Yes,” said Neena: “Oh, yes.”) and blinked.
“Jesus. Is that you, Tig?”
“Yes. It’s me.”
“You’re never home this early.”
Vesicle, peering uncertainly into the room, seemed more puzzled than hurt. “Is that you, Neena?” he said.
“Of course it is.” She sounded angry and impatient. She pushed Ed away and jumped up, straightening her dress, running her fingers through her hair. “Who else did you expect?”
Tig seemed to think for a moment.
“I don’t know.” After a moment he gave Ed a direct look and said, “I didn’t expect it would be anybody. I thought—”
“Maybe I’ll leave,” Ed offered, anxious to make a gesture.
Neena stared at him.
“What? No,” she said. “I don’t want you to.” Suddenly she turned away from them both and went over to the stove. “Turn the lights up,” she said. “It’s cold in here.”
“We can’t breed with them, you know,” Tig said.
Her left shoulder seemed to shrug of its own accord. “Do you want noodles?” she demanded. “Because it’s all we’ve got.”
By this time, Ed’s heart rate had gone down, his concentration had returned, and he was hearing noise again in the warren. At first it sounded normal—squeals of kids, hologram soundtracks, a general domestic clatter. Then he heard louder voices. Shouts coming closer. Then two or three loud, flat explosions.
“What’s this?” he said. “People are running. Listen!”
Neena looked at Tig. Tig looked at Ed. They looked at one another, the three of them.
“It’s the Cray sisters,” Ed said. “They’ve come for me.”
Neena turned back to the stove as if she could ignore this.
“Do you want noodles?” she said impatiently.
Ed said, “Get the gun, Tig.”
Vesicle got the gun, which he kept in a thing that looked like a meat safe. It was wrapped in a piece of rag. He unwrapped it, looked at it for a moment, then offered it to Ed.
“What are we going to do?” he whispered.
“We’re going to leave here,” Ed said.
“What about the children?” shouted Neena suddenly. “I’m not leaving my children!”
“You can come back later,” Ed told her. “It’s me they want.”
“We haven’t eaten anything!” Neena said.
She held on to the stove. Eventually they pulled her away from it and made off through the warren in the direction of the Straint Street entrance. It took forever. They blundered over outstretched limbs in the bluish light. They couldn’t get up any speed. Neena hung back as hard as she could, or made off in inappropriate directions. Every time they went through a door they upset something or someone. Every cubicle seemed connected to every other. If the warren was like a maze in a cheap nightmare, so was the pursuit: it would seem to diminish, then, just as Ed relaxed, start up from another direction, more energetic than before. A firefight developed, ran away with itself, guttered into silence. There were screams and explosions. Who was shooting who, amid the echoes in a cubicle full of smoke? Miniature gun-punks in rainslickers. One-shot cultivars with tusks a foot long. Silhouettes of men, women and children scattering with disconnected motions against the sudden flash of guns. Neena Vesicle looked back. A shudder went through her. She laughed suddenly.
“You know, I haven’t run like this for ages!” she said.
She hugged Ed’s arm. Her eyes, lively and slightly unfocused with excitement, glittered into his. Ed had seen it before. He laughed back.
“Steady down, kid,” he said.
Shortly after that, the light got greyer and less blue. The air got colder. One minute they were scattering someone’s evening meal across the floor—Ed had time to see an arc of liquid, a ceramic bowl spinning on its edge like a coin, an image of the Kefahuchi Tract glittering out of some hologram display to the sound of cathedral music—the next they were out on Straint Street, panting and banging one another on the back.
It was snowing again. Straint, a perspective made of walls and streetlights, stretched off into the distance like a canyon full of confetti. Old political posters flapped off the walls. Ed shivered. Sparks, he thought suddenly: Sparks in everything. He thought: Shit.
After a minute he began to laugh.
“We made it,” he said.
Tig Vesicle began to laugh too. “What are we like?” he said.
“We made it,” Neena said experimentally. She said it once or twice more. “We made it,” she said.
“You certainly did, dear,” Bella Cray agreed.
Her sister said: “We thought you’d come out this side.”
“In fact we banked on it, dear.”
The two of them stood there in the middle of the street in the blowing snow, where they had been waiting all along. They were fully made up, and clutching their big purses to their chests like women out for fun on the edge of the garment district seven o’clock at night, ready to drink and do drugs and meet what the world had to offer. To keep the chill off they had each added a little waist-length fake-fur jacket to their black skirts and secretary blouses. In addition, Bella was wearing a pillbox hat of the same material. Their bare legs were reddened and chapped above black calf-length winter boots. Evie Cray began to unzip her purse. She looked up from the operation halfway through.
“Oh, you can go, dear,” she said to Neena, as if she was surprised to find her still there. “We won’t need you.”
Neena Vesicle looked from Ed to her husband. She made an awkward gesture.
“No,” she said.
“Go on,” Ed said gently. “It’s me they want.”
Neena shook her head stubbornly.
“You can go,” Ed told her.
“It’s him we want,” agreed Evie Cray. “You go on, dear.”
Tig Vesicle took Neena’s hand. She let him draw her away a pace or two but she kept her body and her eyes turned to Ed. He gave her his best smile. Go on, he mouthed silently. Then out loud he said:
“Thanks for everything.”
Neena smiled uncertainly back.
“By the way,” Evie Cray said, “we want your fucking husband too.”
She reached into her purse, but Ed already had the Hi-Lite Autoloader out, which he held close enough to her face so that the muzzle just touched her under the left eye, indenting the flesh there. “Keep your hand in the bag, Evie,” he advised. “And don’t do anything.” He looked her up and down. “Unless this is a cultivar you’re running.”
“You’ll never know, dipshit,” she said.